Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 Benchmarks With Early Fedora 13 Numbers

With Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 having made
it out yesterday, we couldn't resist but to run some new benchmarks of the
Lucid Lynx after our original tests last month found Ubuntu
10.04 was off to a poor performance start. In some areas the performance of
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 remains lower than in Ubuntu 9.10 -- largely due to performance
regressions upstream in the Linux kernel -- but we have also included some very
early performance numbers from Fedora 13.

While Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx has already had two development releases,
Red Hat has not yet put out any development releases for Fedora 13. The first
and only alpha release of Fedora 13 is planned for the middle of February while
a beta release will come at the start of April and then the final release will
enter the world towards the middle of May, assuming there are no delays. With
that said, Fedora 13 is still heavily in development and will certainly change
a lot between now and then (especially with how closely they follow some packages
and their upstream involvement), but we have included benchmark numbers from the
2010-01-13 nightly compose desktop image of Fedora Rawhide. Beyond being an early
snapshot of Fedora 13, Red Hat enables numerous debugging options within their
Rawhide kernel and other packages that are then disabled prior to the official
release. These debugging options can impair the system's performance, but as with
all Fedora and Ubuntu releases, we will be back with many more benchmarks throughout
the development cycle. These Fedora 13 numbers should just be looked at for reference
purposes.

We used the 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 and Fedora
13 (2010-01-13), which were compared to the stable version of Ubuntu 9.10 (x86_64).
Ubuntu 9.10 uses the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, GNOME 2.28.1, X Server 1.6.4, and GCC
4.4.1. Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 ups the package versions to the Linux 2.6.32 kernel,
GNOME 2.29.4, X Server 1.7.4 RC2, and GCC 4.4.3. Our January 13 Rawhide snapshot
contained the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, GNOME 2.29.4, X Server 1.7.3, and GCC 4.4.2.
Both Ubuntu and Fedora use the EXT4 file-system by default and all three distributions
were tested with their default settings and options. The NVIDIA 190.53 display
driver was installed on Ubuntu and Fedora to provide 3D acceleration support for
the NVIDIA Quadro graphics hardware that was used during testing.

The hardware used for testing was a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook
with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, 4GB of system memory, a 100GB Hitachi
HTS72201 hard drive, and a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M 512MB graphics processor. The
Phoronix Test Suite software
was used for carrying out all of these tests autonomously and in a fully repeatable
manner. The test profiles included Lightsmark, Nexuiz, World of Padman, 1080p
H.264 video playback, Apache, PostgreSQL, C-Ray, 7-Zip, x264, IOzone, PostMark,
Threaded I/O Tester, John The Ripper, Gcrypt, GnuPG, and our custom battery-power-usage
test.

On the following pages are our benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 9.10,
Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2, and the very early look at the Fedora 13 performance.